UN Security Council reforms long overdue

Russia believes that reforming the Security Council would be helpful in mitigating the American domination of the UN.

foot-dragging at the ministerial conference
on reforming the UN Security Council that has just ended in Rome. Indeed, the
UN’s governing body badly needs reform.

“The UN’s predecessor, the League of Nations,
was an instrument of global domination operated by Great Britain and the United
States,” says Dr Leonid Savin, Editor-in-Chief of the Moscow-based Geopolitika,
or Geopolitics, journal. “The UN Security Council remains much the same, save
for the moderating influence on non-Western members including Russia and China.
Germany and India feel discriminated against and argue that many international
crisis situations, including those in Syria and Libya, would become better
tractable at the hands of an enlarged Security Council, which would include
several more permanent and many more non-permanent members.”

Unfortunately, Savin says, initiatives of
this kind get bogged down in the almost 200-member UN General Assembly and
encounter powerful opposition by the United States.

Reform, meanwhile, is long overdue.

“The Security Council as it is has shown
its inability to cope with the rise of geopolitical turbulence observed in the
world in the period since the millennium, says Dr Yevgenia Voiko, a foreign
policy expert at the Moscow-based Institute of Political Conjuncture. “This
means it has to be overhauled, as probably has the entire United Nations
organisation.”

Russia and China have used their permanent
seats on the UN Security Council to veto unfair sanctions against Iran and
outside interference in the conflict in Syria. Russia believes that reforming
the council would be helpful in mitigating the American domination of the UN
even further. At the same time, it does not haste any reform, fearing a larger
Security Council would become a cumbersome bureaucracy incapable of tackling
crisis situations with sufficient speed.

Putting together a ‘road map' for UN reform
remains a matter for discussion.